“Did you come east on the Parkway to get here?” asked a booktable visitor yesterday at the winery. “There’s ice on Mabry Mill pond” she said, herself a photographer, and, seeing my photo-notecards, she knew I’d want to know such…
I think I heard somewhere that the winery building at Chateau Morrisette was the largest timberframe structure east of the Mississippi. I do know the timbers were dredged from the bottom of Puget Sound after being submerged in cold waters…
Technology. Bah! Humbug. It’s down a few notches on my list of the Wonders of our Age. Sometimes I wonder how things would be without so much of it intruding into our dreams and waking hours. But then, I’ve just…
Tattered clouds scattered east across what had an hour before been a cloudless cold-blue sky. The first arctic air mass of the season was on its way, predicted to arrive by late afternoon. Already the air had taken on a…
It was too long a trip from Floyd to Mobile to be comfortable with her going alone, though for me, everyone there would be a stranger. Maybe I shouldn’t go at all. It was her home town where we were…
I used this image on our Christmas Gathering invitations this year (and last, and the one before that, I think) because first of all, it is a winter scene. But then in any season, it speaks to me of refuge,…
An oak leaf will refuse to let go until December, clacking and waggling brown and brittle in the cold breeze. The serrated leaves of a smooth-boled American Beech turn almost white and become so thin and light they hang like…
Thanks to kind reader Missy for jogging my “remembery” (as the one of our kids used to say) that I had mentioned offering a Christmas Package Deal from Goose Creek Press. And I’m prepared to do just that. So listen…
Saturday and Sunday past I spent four hours each day manning a mostly-invisible table that did not provide food or drink for a population of folk who surged into the winery reception room when the doors officially opened at noon…
Pardon, please, as I look back again. The anniversary of our move north from Alabama to Virginia (Dec 18, 1974) approaches. This little bit of memoir was cut and pasted from the early Fragments of August 2002. For those of…
Comfort food: those edibles that bring us to a safe, warm-fuzzy place–the gustatorial counterpart of sucking our thumbs while holding our worn flannel bankies next to our cheeks. In the south, whatever comfort you find in your foods, they will…
One advantage of living, well not exactly off the grid, but well out of the lava-flow of change usually associated with modern “civilized” parts of the country is that visiting said civilization is always replete with surprise. Things change, and…